There aren’t many things in the world that truly matter. In the world of EMS one thing that does is the bond you have with your partner. In a world ruled by chaos, you have to have something to rely on -- that’s your partner. You don’t have that you are truly alone.
In time Troy and I got along well. Troy liked working with me because I was older, I didn’t tell tales out of school, and though he wouldn’t admit it, I did a decent job of keeping him out of trouble. But most of all I think he liked working with me because I recognized just how good he was at his job.
He ran the calls, and I had his back. Some lesser medics said he was just lucky to get the saves he did. But he had a gift. One evening, when we were covering a suburban town, we drove by the baseball field to watch some of the American Legion regional baseball championship. We parked just beyond the centerfield fence, got out and stood leaning against the front of the ambulance. It was a beautiful evening. Parents, friends and people like us just interested in seeing a good game, filled the bleachers and lined the sides of the field. I estimated a crowd of several thousand. The air smelled of popcorn, hotdogs and bubble gum.
“He’s got to be throwing ninety,” Troy said, referring to the six-foot three inch Central team pitcher. “I read about him in the Courant. He may get drafted in the first round. All he throws is fastballs and off-speed pitches. His Dad won’t let him throw any curves till he turns eighteen. Even knowing what’s coming, they still can’t hit him. Pat’s Dad was the same with him, except Pat couldn’t throw ninety. He did all right, but sometimes he’d get tattooed. Then he got to Amherst, developed his curve and was a small college All-American his sophomore year. Junior year, he threw his arm out.”
“So like you he had a chance to go pro?” Victor had mentioned something to me about Troy’s prowess as a centerfielder for his high school baseball team, not to mention football, basketball and track.
“Why would I want to go pro, when I have all the women, glory and fame I got here, huh?” He laughed and punched me in the shoulder. “Don’t believe everything they say about me. Only half of it is true.”
“You were a star?”
“I still am.” He winked.
“Excuse me for forgetting.”
“I’ll let it go this time.” He turned back to the game to watch the pitcher drill the batter in the chest with a fastball. The batter dropped at home plate motionless.
The crowd went silent. The players and umpire stood looking at the young man. The catcher motioned frantically to a coach.
“Meet me at home plate,” Troy said. With one graceful motion, he scaled the five-foot fence and sprinted across the field.
I got in the ambulance, and hit the lights on. It looked like the umpire had started compressions on the boy’s chest.
I drove around the foul pole, and down the first baseline. I could see Troy kneeling over the boy. I saw him raise his fist and strike him in the chest. Then my view was obscured.
By the time I had the stretcher out and with the help of a player was wheeling it to the plate, the boy was sitting up, and the crowd applauding. His parents had come out of the stands.
“I can play. I’m all right,” the boy said. “I’m all right.”
The boy’s mother cried. The trembling father kept shaking Troy’s hand. “He’ll be fine,” Troy said. “But he has to go to the hospital.”
The boy looked at his coach. “I can play.”
“Son, you weren’t breathing,” the coach said.
“I’m fine.”
“Well, you are and you aren’t,” Troy said. “Here’s what happened. Your heart beats like this.” He made a squeezing motion with his fist. “The ball hit your chest when your heart was in what we call a vulnerable state, so instead of refilling, it got knocked out of sync and started beating spastically like a handful of worms. It was in what we call ventricular fibrillation. The heart can’t pump blood. No blood gets to your brain, you pass out. When I punched you in the chest – you may not remember and if it’s sore I apologize – I did it to send an electrical change into the heart, which seemed to have worked. It reset it, and now it’s back beating right. So you’re fine, but you need to get checked out, and probably be observed overnight just to make certain everything is back to normal. No one can promise that it is. We need to be on the safe side, besides all the chicks will bring you flowers, you’ve got to take advantage of that. Trust me.”
“It’s best, Adam,” the mother said. “You know we want you to play, but you scared us.”
“My chest is sore,” the boy said.
“Attaboy,” Troy said. “Now hop up on the stretcher. We’ll give you a hand.”
The crowd stood and applauded as we placed him on the stretcher. Troy took off his Yankees hat and acknowledged their ovation like he was Mickey Mantle himself.
Troy said later, “My mother told me once everyone has two choices in life -- to be on the stage or to be in the audience. I like the stage.”
“I can see you do.”
We were often on the news, but in critical cases still we had a point of pride to try to get off the scene before the cameras arrived. But even more important than beating the TV cameras was beating Ben’s arrival at the scene.
“482, shooting at Edgewood and Homestead. On a one, wait for police.”
“482 acknowledges, Edgewood and Homestead, going to wait for the cops.”
We were just three blocks away at Albany and Magnolia.
“404, I’m at Sigourney and Farmington, headed there,” Ben came over the radio.”
“Scoop and skee-daddle,” Troy said. “Burger King is on me if we get out of there before Ben.”
“They want us to wait for the cops.”
“Let’s see what we find.”
We came screaming down Edgewood. A crowd was in the street. There were no police cars. “There he is,” Troy said.
A man lay face down on the sidewalk. Troy was opening his door before I had even come to a stop. With him running to the patient, I had no choice but to pull the stretcher and join him in the crowd. Troy had rolled the man on his back. He pulled an ET tube out of his right leg pocket, just above his knee, ripped open the wrapping, and then shoved his hand into the man’s mouth. The proper way to intubate someone -- to put a breathing tube down their windpipe -- was to kneel by their head and use a steel bladed laryngoscope to move their tongue to the side, and look down their throat for the vocal chords, which should be illuminated by the tiny light bulb at the end of the blade. Troy several times at shooting scenes, stuck his hand down the patient’s throat, and used his fingers to feel for the epiglottis, the little piece of tissue that guards the opening to the chords. Once he found it, he could blindly manipulate the tube into the trachea. It wasn’t easy, but if you knew how to do it was a time saver.
“I’m in,” Troy said. “Let’s get him out of here.”
We got him on the board and managed to get him in the back of the ambulance without being knocked over by the crowd fighting to help us. Troy did CPR while I drove. As I turned right on Homestead, I saw Ben’s fly car come wailing up the street following two police cars. The police cars pulled on to Edgewood. Ben followed us.
“82, pull over, I’ll hop in.”
“I don’t know if you want to leave your car here,” I said.
“Cross the Woodland Bridge and stop there.”
“Don’t stop!” Troy shouted. “Get him to the hospital.”
“Troy’s already got him intubated,” I said. “Help us unload at the hospital. I’m patching it in now.”
He followed right on our tail. When I parked a minute later at Saint Fran, he was out of his fly car and reaching to open up the back. “We had to go quick,” I said. “We were on the scene before we could holdup.”
Ben nodded, and then looked to Troy, who was still doing compressions. “What do you have?”
“Shot to the chest. By the way, nice to see you.”
“I’ll do the compressions,” Ben said. “Pull the stretcher.”
He stood on the stretcher rails and did compressions all the way to the trauma room, then left without saying a word.
The ED doctors cracked the man’s chest, and did open cardiac massage, while they tried to tie off the hole in his heart, but he’d already pretty much bled out. They pronounced him dead before Troy had even turned in his paperwork.
“Did you see the look on Ben’s face – foiled again,” Troy said gleefully. “That was a classic.”
“I didn’t notice,” I said.
“I’m always out of there before him. Always. Too quick.”
I tried not to encourage his behavior.
Billy Dalton was a veteran medic, who after ten years in the street, had started medical school a year ago. He was back for the summer to make some money before heading off to school again. He asked me about the shooting, and I told him how Troy had digitally intubated the man.
“Did he tell you who taught him how to do it?”
“No.” It was hard for me to imagine anyone teaching Troy anything.
“I precepted him when he started here. He’s crazy, but he has a gift. Did he tell you about the time we delivered triplets? They were all premies, barely the size of my hand. I delivered them, handed them to Troy. They were so small they just slipped out. I didn’t think any of them would make it. They were twenty-four weeks. I handed them to him blue and he raised them to his mouth and blew pink air into them. All three lived. The most amazing thing was it was the only time I would see his hands shake. He’s smart too. You know that, you’ve worked with him. I tried to get him to go to school at night, but he’d have no part of it. I told him he’d be an awesome trauma surgeon. He said he’s not the book type. ‘You and Pat can be the doctors. I’ll caddy for you at the club on Sundays,’ he said.”
I brought it up with Troy later. “You’d be in your glory running a trauma team,” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You just have to put the work in. If you haven’t figured out by now that you can do anything, I don’t think you ever will.”
He just grunted. “Books aren’t for me,” he said, and hid his face in the sports page.
Many people think in terms of career advancement, making money, climbing the ladder, but for those like Troy, there was nothing above being a paramedic. The adrenaline, the freedom, the sights of the city, the stories, the view of life and the unique understanding of its fragile balances – you didn’t get that in an office job. He was a soldier, not a general, and the streets of the city were his turf, his home.
“482, Sigorney Park, male unconscious, on a one.”
In the bushes by the basketball court, we found a homeless man sleeping. We woke him up and moved him on his way. As we walked back to the ambulance, a ball from the basketball court bounced toward us. Troy snatched it, and spun it up on the tip of his finger.
A boy, who looked to be about ten, wearing an overlarge Isaiah Thomas basketball jersey approached to reclaim it. “Can I have the ball back?”
Troy stopped spinning the ball, took it in his hands, and looked at the basket. He had to be thirty feet away. “You think I can make it from here?” he said to the boy.
The boy shook his head.
Troy fired a high arching shot. The ball swished down through the torn net.
“Nice shot,” I said.
Troy clapped his hands. The boy who’d rebounded the ball threw him the ball back instinctively.
Troy hit a second shot, then a third and a fourth.
“You good,” the boy said. “Can you jam?”
In an instant Troy drove to the basket. He leapt high, swiveled his body, held the ball aloft in one hand, and slammed it down through the net.
A crowd had gathered now as Troy spun the ball again like a globe on the tip of his finger. He passed it from the finger on his right hand to the pointer finger on the left and back again.
“Maybe you’ve seen him in the NBA,” I said.
“Who you play for? What’s your name?” a boy asked.
“Get his autograph,” a thin boy with a toothless grin said.
The ball slipped off Troy’s finger. A small boy with a gold chain around his neck had caught his eye. The chain spelled the name “Troy.”
“Where’d you get the necklace?” Troy asked.
“My momma gave it to me.”
“That your name?”
He nodded.
“Where’d you get that name?”
“My momma gave it to me.”
“She named him after a taxi driver,” another boy said.
“A taxi driver?”
“Yeah, he was born on the way to the hospital. My mama named him after the driver man like the law says.”
Troy looked down at the birthmark on the kid’s neck. He’d tell me later, “My first week on the job I had a seventeen year old mother in labor. Corner of Collins and Sigourney, she says ‘I gotta go.’ Kid popped out just like that.”
“Here,” Troy handed him the ball now.
The kid smiled.
“Your mother doing all right?”
“She’s home with my baby sister.”
“Be good to her,” Troy said. “Stay in school.”
